Friday, 9 December 2016

Neil Young - Peace Trail, album review

Dialectic vs Didactic

Where The Rolling Stones have presented us with a Christmas
album Blue and Lonesome that
resonates with the festive spirit of capitalism – though acknowledging its
wonderful authentic blues and genuine return to roots – Neil Young gives us a
pure gift of Peace Trail wrapped in a
ribbon of simple, noble endeavour.

Before reviewing, I will comment on one other review of
Young’s album that I read today, and I do like to read around when I too am
commenting. Andy Gill, writing for The
Independent, doesn’t like it very much, calling it self-parody, with a set of desultory peacenik songs. That’s fine,
by the way, because it is opinion and each is entitled, but I was nonetheless
bemused by such a dismissive summation by someone who in another assessment in
his set of reviews describes John Legend’s latest as musically in the dialectic between comforting familiarity and
exploratory urges. You see, I think one could take the Legend line and
ascribe it more accurately to the actual legend Young, though it would seem rather pretentious in
applying to his simpler take on a truly long-established familiarity as well as
a performer proven to experiment and push against boundaries and expectations.

But that’s just opinion. The songs on Peace Trail are certainly more folk than rock, and I’d say languid
rather than ‘desultory’, but that’s just…well, you know. The title track is
probably the most Young-ish, and the most melodic as well as developed as such
in this set of ten tracks. It is a sweet melody, and the use of an auto-tuned
chorus is a delightful experiment in producing a sound quite contrary to the
lo-lo-fi of his other demonstrative back-to-basics material. The electric
guitar work here is also classic Young, and the last we will hear of this.

Afterwards, there is a simplicity that is also familiar in
the other nine tracks, most blues-based and laid bare, so to speak, by the
drumming of Jim Keltner. Second Can’t
Stop Working seems to be an anthem for this 71 year old’s continued gigging
and recording output, this album his 37th, probably, and the
super-fuzzed harmonica outbursts are probably not to be called ‘experimental’
but they certainly disrupt surprisingly, and superbly, and not in a desultory
way, but….

Third Indian Givers
gives it away in the title with its peacenik narrative about Native Americans,
without having to say so that deliberately, and this is a folk blues that
doesn’t exactly soar, but the fuzzed harp does shout at the end, and Keltner’s
drums roll us all the way to the end. Fourth Show Me follows the same theme and has a neat little bass line for
this blues, provided by Paul Bushnell. I know, the history of protest songs has
proven that not a whole lot has been achieved over the many years of their didactics,
but that doesn’t stop the noble urge.
Texas Rangers is, yes, quite ramshackle, apparently an ad lib – the drums
seeming to follow one step behind the existentialism – but it is a bit of a
musical hoot. Ok, not the greatest. Sixth Terrorist
Suicide Hang Gliders does, however, take peacenik satire to a great height,
excusing the pun, and you know that Young isn’t aiming for [here it comes
again] high art, but his aim is sure and true in consistently attacking and
mocking the real and dangerously ‘simplistic’ [another word Gill uses in his
Young review] realities of people’s paranoias and prejudices and hatreds.

John Oats is
another in the vein of Texas Rangers
but also another in the vein of caring and commenting. But yes again, not the
greatest. Eighth My Pledge is so much
bittersweet fun, auto-tuning being used again to make its more complex points
about music as well as modern living and history. The album closes on My New Robot which again, I think,
presents Young’s genuine urge to experiment, and comically so – though always
the inherent warning of a world gone weird – with this robotic voiced take on
an Amazon-gizmo-inspired new world order.

John Legend’s latest, titled Darkness and Light – which ought to be a serious metaphor, but I
don’t know – is for me formulaic rather than experimental, its dialectic no
more that the remote possibility of its title. Production values are superior,
over content; auto-tuning, I would guess, is a norm rather than a device; there
is a distorted-effects chorus on the banal, really, Love Me Now instead of an actually played fuzzfizzed harmonica, and
I hear the echo of many others rather than, for example, Young echoing Young, a
consistency that has lasted and continues. But that is just opinion. Neither
here nor there.

About Me

This blog is essentially for music reviews, including live gigs. Frequently heavy on 60s/70s nostalgia, the time of my musical growing-up, there is also an eclectic and contemporary range. In addition I fuel a commitment to posting themed album covers for the simple challenge and fun of it - as I've started, I'll keep going. Enjoy.